by Anne Morice
On this occasion, there were no questions to be asked, at least out loud, for the people in charge were invisible; but the sounds of their activity in the passage outside evoked exactly the same uneasiness. A door close to mine opened and shut four times in a minute; and each time it opened my straining ears caught the urgent murmur of voices. This was followed by creakings and scufflings in the corridor and the sound of heavy objects being trundled past.
Soon, all the sounds died away, but the sudden hush brought no release of tension. Just as in the aircraft, I was tempted to ring for a glass of water, simply to establish human contact, but luckily this bold gesture was not called for. In the nick of time, O’Malley came charging in with my elevenses.
Her eyes literally popped when she saw Aunt Moo’s stack of groceries, so I was able to unload most of them on her, to brighten up the Nurses’ Canteen; and, after the most perfunctory pretence that the recent brouhaha had signified nothing out of the ordinary, she admitted that poor old Miss Blake had been the cause of it. She had given them all something to think about, by having a heart attack, within two minutes of swallowing her mid-morning cuppa.
‘Oh, no! But how awful! She’s not . . . ?’
‘Now don’t go getting excited, will you? She’s being well looked after. We’ve moved her over to the intensive-care ward.’
‘And will she be all right, really?’
‘She still has plenty of fight left in her, I dare say,’ was all that I could get from her.
(iii)
‘By the way, how did your conference go?’ I asked Robin, towards the end of the day.
He had arrived at the hospital hours after I had given him up, and had then been inclined to feel aggrieved because I was not ready to leave on the instant. However, I had pacified him by making quite a passable snack out of the remaining jar of homemade pate and some melba toast, which was all that was left of Aunt Moo’s bounty, and had regaled him, as he ate it, with a description of my eventful day. The question came as a postscript to this recital.
‘I can’t claim to be black and blue from pats on the back,’ he answered, ‘but we struggled through.’
‘We? You mean Colie boy was with you?’
‘He came along for the ride. Anyway, the upshot was that I’m to stay put, until the picture gets a bit clearer.’
‘Which picture? Or is there only one?’
‘No, I think there must be two. It would be so neat to assume that Sir Maddox was on the scent of the robbery gang and that one of its members was also at the party and all set to bump him off. It won’t work, though. There simply isn’t a shred of evidence to support it.’
‘So you believe it was suicide, after all?’
‘No, far from it. I refuse to accept that a sane man would take his own life in such a way, at such a moment. Furthermore, if Brand was in a suicidal frame of mind that evening, then I don’t know Christmas from Easter and I’m in the wrong profession.’
‘So what is the alternative? Is it possible that he took the wrong pill by mistake? It was dark, after all, and he was pretty squiffy by that time.’
‘Yes, but cyanide, Tessa! It’s simply inconceivable. Only a madman would carry the stuff around on him, and you’d have to be worse than mad to conceal it among your indigestion pills, or whatever. Besides, there were several grains of poison in the dregs of his glass. So the dose must have been dropped into the tumbler, which is the method a murderer would have been obliged to use. If it had been self-administered, he’d have been more likely to swallow the stuff in one go, and send the vodka down as a chaser.’
‘It’s odd. though, isn’t it?’
‘Very. What, in particular?’
‘The dose being actually in the drink and his not noticing it. I was always given to understand that vodka was practically tasteless. Why didn’t he take one sip and spit it out? He can’t have been that far gone in his cups.’
‘No, but you’re forgetting how he insisted on mixing it with that special brand of vermouth. I think the vodka obsession was really more of an ideological stunt than anything else, because the vermouth had such a strong flavour that it wouldn’t have made much difference what you put with it. And, if he had gulped some down and then realised there was something wrong, he wouldn’t have had much time to do anything about it. Death would have been practically instantaneous.’
‘But he didn’t even cry out or make choking noises, as far as anyone can tell. Christabel would have heard that. She may be blind, but she’s not deaf.’
‘Well, I have my theories about that, too; but, on the other hand, she might not have noticed. Everyone was groaning in undertones and flinging themselves around a bit, I shouldn’t wonder. And the tape recorder was turned up so loud that it drowned out most other noises. No, it all points to murder, and the culprit has to be one of those five people incarcerated with him in the good old fun-room. I should think the Harper Barringtons would have to change its name after this, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, Rumpus does turn out to have been more suitable, after all.’
‘So, there we are! One victim and five suspects, all together in a sealed room, as the saying goes, and not the whiff of a motive. Cole still insists that there must be a connection somewhere with the art gang, but I’m coming to the end of that particular road. It is too much to swallow that, by coming down here to nose out one crime, I set off another which was related to it. As though one’s mere presence had acted as a kind of catalyst.’
‘Cata what?’
‘Lyst.’
‘Thank you. And that reminds me; you’ve left one off yours. You said there were five suspects, but even excluding our party, I make it six.’
‘You include Anabel? No, I hadn’t overlooked her and I don’t rule her out on grounds of youth, what’s more. I imagine if a person has murderous tendencies they’re just as likely to come out at sixteen as at any other age. It’s simply lack of motive which puts her out of the running. She was clearly batty about her old Uncle Mad, and I simply don’t believe her to be capable of putting on an act of that kind.’
‘I agree with you there, but it’s still possible that she was an unwilling accessory. She was certainly in the best position of all of us to see what everyone in the room was up to. In fact, it’s a big surprise to me that it’s Prince who’s been shot, and not Anabel, herself.’
‘And it’s a big surprise to me that it should take you half an hour to get your face plastered up for a ten minute drive. I doubt if there’ll be any photographers outside, you know. Cole has been at great pains to keep your little escapade dark.’
‘Good old Cole,’ I said bitterly. ‘How did we ever live without him? Come on, then; let’s go.’
I bade a tearful farewell to Nurse O’Malley, who, in twenty-four hours, had become my dearest friend in all the world, and she assured me that Christabel was doing as well as could be expected. However, as I had no idea what anyone had expected, the point was lost.
On the way home to The Towers, I reverted once more to the subject of Anabel’s dog:
‘Dolly may know more than she’s told me, because she keeps her ear well to the ground, and she was certainly in a big hurry to get away all of a sudden when I started probing; but she did let it out that he can only have been dead for a few hours when they found him. So that means he was shot within half a mile of the barn at about the same time as I was there myself.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that he was killed on the spot. He could have been shot first and dumped there after dark. You didn’t hear anything, did you?’
‘I have a vague memory of hearing shots in the distance, when I was walking towards the barn; but that’s such a normal sound in those woods and it wouldn’t have made any particular impression. Besides, I had other things on my mind.’
‘So I gathered. Some day you must tell me what they were.’
‘I will, if my theory is ever proved. Although that seems rather unlikely now. Listen, though, Robin, I’v
e just had a crazy idea. Don’t laugh, please! Do you suppose the murderer killed Prince as a not very subtle warning to Anabel to keep her mouth shut about anything she may have seen?’
‘I’m not laughing,’ Robin said gloomily. ‘The same possibility occurred to me, as soon as you told me about it.’
Thirteen
(i)
The next day was Saturday and, although Robin went bounding off to meet Cole, just as usual, the full tedium of another day at The Towers did not set in at once, owing to the arrival through the post of some compulsive reading-matter. It was contained in a package which Dolly delivered with my breakfast tray.
I had been intending to detain her for a little light conversation about the demise of a golden retriever, but the sight of my agent’s label on the parcel instantly banished all such ideas.
In the hurly-burly of the past few days I had almost, though admittedly not quite, forgotten about the première of my last film, which had taken place a few days earlier in New York. My agent, ever watchful in these matters, had acquired copies of the local papers which had covered it, and had posted me the clippings. There was quite a batch of them, all long and mostly enthusiastic, but the size of the package was accounted for by the fact that, in one case, she had enclosed the whole magazine. I saw why, after I had waded through every word of the review, of which there was hardly a cross one. At the bottom of it, she had written in red ink: ‘See Also P. 32.’
I obeyed with all speed and discovered that P. 32 was the week’s Personality Page. There were seven names featured on this occasion and we all got two or three paragraphs. Mine was based on the fact that I was married to ‘Scotland Yard’s Up and Coming Robin Price’, a circumstance which the writer evidently expected would send his eight million readers into a ferment of excitement.
He referred to me thereafter as ‘Cinemactress Crichton’ and to Robin as ‘Husband Price’. I was quoted as saying that I found one of our British Policemen Wonderful and there was a photograph of us, grinning at each other in a restaurant, rather startlingly captioned ‘Crichton in Custody’.
However, there is a theory that it never matters what they say so long as they say something, and I was quite dazzled by my agent’s astuteness in sending me the magazine intact. It might be considered beyond the pale to scatter press cuttings over the coffee table, but no one could object to the current number of a celebrated periodical, even if it had been pressed out to fall open at a certain page; and I could hardly wait to see Husband Price’s face, when his eye lighted on this potted biography.
Unfortunately, it was an experience which had to be postponed until lunch time, and as a temporary substitute Aunt Moo was practically useless. I did finally get her curiosity sharpened up to the pitch where she gathered the magazine into her lap, but it did not fall open at the right page, after all, and she became totally bogged down in a colour advertisement for an international airline. For some mysterious reason, they had chosen to promote their image not, as one might expect, with undertakings to fly from place to place in reasonable time and all engines turning over, but with proud boasts of the haute cuisine they dished up on the journey. One got the impression that they considered it almost worth the trouble of crossing the Atlantic in order to sample the menu, and Aunt Moo certainly took it in this spirit. After an interminable discussion about the trickiness of doling out lemon sorbet to two hundred passengers simultaneously, she announced that it would not be very practical, since one would presumably be required to pay the full fare, whether one accepted all eight courses, or made do with a paltry half-dozen.
I was bracing myself to enter the ring for the second round, when Dolly burst in with the news that Mr Robinson was on the telephone. Having been sent bursting out again to collect further particulars, she returned a few minutes later and announced that it was a private matter, not to be divulged to an intermediary. I could see that this had made a slight dent in Aunt Moo’s armour, but Guy should have known that it required something pithier than that to get her on her feet.
There followed the time-honoured routine, with Dolly darting back and forth, until the breakthrough was achieved. Still adamant in her refusal to leave her armchair, Aunt Moo consented to receive Mr Robinson, in person, at four o’clock that afternoon. Hearing this, I realised that her mind would thenceforth be given over exclusively to the question of chocolate buns, cucumber sandwiches, etcetera, to accompany this interview, and that hopes of planting some tiny seed of interest in the career of Cinemactress Crichton could now be classed as withered. So I let her ponder these weighty problems in silence, while I moodily skimmed through some of the other pages in the magazine.
Whatever Fates are in charge of these matters had certainly known a thing or two when they arranged for me to be born under the sign of Gemini. Injecting the blood stream with the acting bug had been a clever follow-up, for few professions call for a more determinedly dual personality. Conniving at, if not actually manipulating my marriage to Robin had put the seal on matters.
In dubbing me ‘Copper’s Moll’, Christabel had uttered an exact half-truth, but it certainly did not describe my condition that morning. The other twin had taken over and, for the time being, I had no more interest in crime and detection than a child of two.
Instead of cogitating on the implications of this new development, I frittered away my time by rereading the film review; then turned back to skim through some of the other items in the Personality line-up. This brought me up to date with the activities of someone called Preacher Jones, who had lashed himself to the steeple of a church in Alabama; also of the ex-President of Consolidated United Trust Enterprises, Inc., who, after a disastrous skirmish with the Monopolies Board, concerning some dud take-over deal, had taken off for an unknown destination, much to the bewilderment of his fourth wife, ex-screen queen, Constance Bellamy. I might add that he was made to look pretty silly by the next story, which featured some Sheik of Oilville, who had been snapped in a millionaire Dallas nite-spot, entwined in the arms of the young female who was about to become bride number eighty; but not once, as I absorbed all this improbable information, did it occur to me that Guy’s insistence on a private conference with Aunt Moo might have some bearing on the murder.
It was left to Husband Price to draw the inference. Aunt Moo having by then retired to the kitchen to knock up a mayonnaise for the dressed crab, I seized the chance to get his undivided attention focused on the New York première. He had become accustomed, if not reconciled, to the actor’s insatiable craving for reassurance, and oohed and ahed his way through the column in quite the proper spirit. Whereupon, with ego restored, I lost all interest in the subject and went straight on to tell him of the meeting which had been convened for four o’clock.
‘Might be worth sitting in on it,’ he remarked.
‘Fat chance! This is top secret, as far as I can make out.’
‘All the more reason,’ replied Scotland Yard’s Up and Coming Price.
‘How do you mean? You’re not suggesting it might have something to do with . . . ? Oh, Robin, do you honestly think so? What fun! Perhaps he intends to cook up some story and get Aunt Moo’s backing for it.’
‘Could be.’
‘Well, I’ll do my best to edge myself in, but it seems pretty hopeless. Guy would never be such a fool as to give himself away in front of me.’
‘No, that’s true.’
‘So what are you suggesting? Not that I should eavesdrop?’
‘Oh, ain’t I?’
‘I suppose it’s worth a try,’ I said thoughtfully, every inch the Copper’s Moll, once more.
(ii)
By half-past three, while Aunt Moo was still at her siesta, I had brought my props onto the back verandah and set them out beside the half-open french windows. They consisted of a limp gros point canvas, to which I had been adding an intermittent stitch over the past fifteen years, some writing-paper and envelopes, and one of the bound copies of Punch. I was new to the game and had still
to learn whether the pretence of reading, writing or sewing would be more conducive to the successful eavesdrop.
Guy made his entrance on the stroke of four, but, in the meantime, I had been privileged to overhear the prologue, which was also a form of dress rehearsal. It consisted of a brief scene between Aunt Moo and Dolly and there was any amount of business with lace tablecloths, silver teapots, etcetera, before, apparently, the scenery satisfied Aunt Moo’s exigent standards.
I say ‘apparently’, because at first I failed to make out a single word that either of them said; and this deficiency did not improve in the case of Aunt Moo. On the other hand, I found that, by shifting my chair this way and that, I was able to tune into Dolly from time to time. This was satisfactory, because it was not Aunt Moo’s responses that I was most keen to hear and, given Guy’s professional diction, I considered myself not badly situated to pick up some pointers.
‘Good afternoon, my dear Mrs Hankinson,’ I heard him say. He was using the unctuous clergyman voice for this occasion, a choice which I applauded, both on artistic and practical grounds. It harmonised with the set and gave maximum audibility.
‘. . . .’
These dots represent Aunt Moo’s reply, and will be used for that purpose throughout the ensuing dialogue. Even when I could distinguish her words, they were invariably too far off the point to be worth including in the records.